Monster: The Ed Gein story – Does the world really need sexy Ed Gein? 

Movie Talk

Created by Ian Brennan 

Starring: Charlie Hunnam (as Ed Gein), Suzanna Son (as Adeline), Vicky Krieps (as Nazi war criminal Ilse Koch) Laurie Metcalf (as Ed Gein’s Mother)  

★☆☆☆☆ 

The Monster series originated from a very cool idea by TV mastermind Ryan Murphy — an opportunity to get into the lives of the people we’ve reviled most as a society. This formula worked extremely well in its first outing, when Evan Peters donned the famously over-framed glasses of Jeffrey Dahmer and portrayed one of — if not the — most reviled people in human history as having human qualities, though just outside our normal understanding of what makes someone human. But the show was able to present a mostly true look at some of the most heinous crimes ever committed in a way that allowed the viewer to feel like they were seeing something from the inside — something they shouldn’t be watching. 

This formula was used again, though with more embellishment and slightly less success (but still quite good), to put the audience inside the world of the Menendez brothers, who brutally killed their parents. This again was an opportunity for the audience to get an inside look at a crime most would fervently express distaste for — but still sit down and watch for eight solid hours from beginning to end. And while the second outing was plagued by even more controversy, the embellishments were often presented as “could have” or “maybe did” happenings. It still felt reasonably grounded in realism — at least the realism of the characters. 

Those first two shows were able to capture some magic and present the deplorable lives of their characters in a humanistic and mostly honest way, allowing the audience to see how the lives that led up to their atrocious crimes could have unfolded in a more or less believable way. That’s what makes the new entry to the series so frustrating. 

The initial announcement of a Monster series digging deep into the life and crimes of Ed Gein was very exciting. Here was one of the most notorious killers and deranged people who ever lived — the inspiration for some of the most horrifying and stomach-churning villains in the history of cinema. The show really plays into that legacy — much to its detriment. So where did it all go wrong? And who ever thought it would be a good idea to bring the world sexy Ed Gein? 

Let’s start with the central performance. I’ll be the first to admit I’m biased against Charlie Hunnam, even if I don’t really know why. I never saw his breakout role in Sons of Anarchy. Really, the only thing I can actively say I remember him in was the Guy Ritchie King Arthur movie, which I didn’t even finish. But for some reason, this guy has always stuck in my craw. Still, I was ready to give him a chance and let him change my mind with his take on Ed Gein. Needless to say, nothing about this performance works. 

Looking at the real-life case of Gein: he was a small-town simpleton in Wisconsin in the 1940s and ’50s who rarely left his house and made the townspeople queasy — even if they didn’t know why. When it was revealed in the late ’50s that all the time he spent in his house was used to make skin suits and furniture — using a mix of bodies he’d dug up from local cemeteries and a few women he’d murdered because they reminded him of his mother — the world stood shocked. Some of the most horrific things people had ever heard of were being uncovered: a body strung up like a skinned deer in the barn, lampshades and seat covers made of human skin, a corpse in the attic dressed like his mother, genitalia amputated and preserved in the kitchen. Yeah — put that on screen, and people won’t be able to look away. 

And they didn’t. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho came out just over ten years later and drew heavily from the actual crimes, though it never used Gein’s real name. The world watched through spread fingers as the horror unfolded in a psychologically terrifying way never experienced before. Then it happened again in the ’70s with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and again in the ’80s and ’90s with Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs. Let’s just say skin suits and cannibalism became good business — in the right hands. 

When we first meet Hunnam’s Gein, he’s already dressed in women’s clothes, furiously masturbating with a belt around his neck — until his mother walks in. Promising enough start. We all knew no one ever reached Gein levels of depravity without some serious mother issues. Then, Hunnam opens his mouth. What. The. Heck. I want to reiterate: Gein was a poor farmer and simpleton who’d never left his hometown. From the existing recordings, he had a standard Midwestern hillbilly accent. What Hunnam does is take inspiration from South Park’s version of Mickey Mouse — high-pitched, slightly aggravated, and so nasally it’s bewildering. On top of this baffling vocal decision, Hunnam shows up as ripped as Van Damme and ready to take his shirt off at a moment’s notice. Then, when he’s in town, he’s personable, has friends, and even a love interest who shares his infatuation with the deranged. So yeah — none of that is accurate. And worse, it doesn’t make the story any more interesting. 

That’s the most frustrating part. The embellishments of the first two shows could be chalked up to dramatic license, but I don’t know what you’d call this. Every part of Gein’s story that is actually compelling is muddled because the writers decided to surround him with more people — an addition that makes every other aspect fall apart. Like, if the girlfriend character had ever been in his house (she publicly stated she never had in real life), the whole thing unravels. His house was so disgusting that nobody could’ve stepped foot inside without alerting the authorities. 

And that’s just one reason this story is so ridiculous — like, beyond all redeemability. But there’s one more embellishment I want to bring up before I destroy this review and never have to think about this show again: the showrunner actually had the gall to write in the main characters from Mindhunter — the greatest show in the history of Netflix — to have Gein help the FBI locate a killer. This did not happen in any way. They’re just piggybacking on the actual successful storytelling of David Fincher to try to bring some legitimacy to this waste of time. 

Let’s just list off a few other things that never happened, and then we can be done with it: 

• Ed Gein never chased after people with a chainsaw. 

• He never had relationships with women but was obsessed with women who reminded him of his mother. 

• He was only ever connected to two murders — both of which he admitted to. 

So? Why does it matter? It’s still a compelling story, right? No. No, it’s not. 

The story dances around what could have been an insightful examination of what loneliness and shame can drive a person to do. What ends up happening here is the viewer gets the smallest of glimpses into the psyche of a truly deranged person, only to abandon the pursuit of intrigue for the lusher — and more profitable — hills of sex and relatability. Let’s get this straight: there would have been almost nothing relatable to a normal person about Ed Gein’s life. He was chastised by his mother from an early age and secluded from the world to the point where he had no social skills or awareness. This guy was not a killing machine. He was just so out of touch with social norms that he didn’t realize what he was doing was wrong — which makes his story even scarier and would have made for an incredible psychological exploration. The writers of this show took the sexy, easy way out — and we are worse for it. 

I do want to take a moment to praise a few of the really great performances in the show: Laurie Metcalf is fantastic as the mother who destroyed her boy. Vicky Krieps (have we even seen her in anything since her breakout role in Phantom Thread?) is fantastic as the Nazi war criminal Ilse Koch. And Lesley Manville (also of Phantom Thread) gives a shattering performance as a woman ready to latch onto anyone who will have her. But it ends about there. I was personally offended by the portrayals of Tom Hollander’s Alfred Hitchcock (so stuffed with prosthetics he couldn’t even move, let alone act) and Will Brill as Tobe Hooper, who makes the visionary filmmaker look as deranged as Gein. 

What hurts most about this iteration of Monster is how much potential there was, and how poorly it was executed. I would love nothing more than to have a thoughtful and psychosocially challenging look at what could make a man become that detached — but this is not it. Stick with any of the masterpieces that were made in his image and ignore this.